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Self-initiated international placements by students have been largely ignored in the literature on outward mobility in higher education. The support given to self-initiated international placement students, if any, has received even less attention. This study aims to address this lacuna.

Drawing on insights from global mobility literature, we conducted a survey of UK university students who engaged in self-initiated international placements to various countries such as France, China, Brazil and Ghana. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics and thematic content analysis.

Findings reveal that these “voluntary” placements can improve language fluency, increase self-confidence, renew stress management abilities and enhance cross-cultural competencies and intercultural sensitivity. The study problematises the lack of support given to these students particularly in terms of career development.

Our paper is one of the first to bring this under-studied population to the attention of career guidance scholars. We propose that scholarly attention should be directed toward the agency of self-initiated international placement students and that targeted career guidance must be provided through more inclusive career services.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the specific forms of training and support that individuals on short-term international assignments (SIAs) receive. It further explores issues such as short notice prior to departure and how this impacts the type of training and support compared to what the extant literature on expatriates intimates. Scholars and practitioners both agree that the increasing deployment of individuals on SIAs presents significant challenges that have not yet been met with the development of appropriate organisational policies and practices.

Drawing on in-depth exploratory qualitative interviews with a sample of German assignees, the paper is abductive in nature with semi-structured interviews analysed through thematic based analysis. The data analysis identifies the need for more tailored training and support through formal and informal mechanisms, developed in pre-departure and post-arrival contexts.

The paper makes key contributions through providing much needed empirical evidence on the training and support short-term assignees receive and in so doing we identify specific forms of training and supports deemed relevant from the perspective of individuals on SIAs. Given the inherent time constraints for SIAs, the significance of informal support, in both pre-departure and post-arrival contexts is especially emphasised.

The paper is one of the first empirical pieces of work to explicitly consider the specific forms of training and support that SIAs consider important. The authors answer calls for greater consideration into the significance of developing a more tailored and strategic approach to managing SIAs as a specific form of an international assignee.

This study aims to focus on dual embeddedness as an important channel through which foreign subsidiaries access and share valuable and idiosyncratic knowledge within the multinational corporation (MNC). The authors examine the dual embeddedness challenges of foreign subsidiaries based in the context of Iran as a transitional market.

The final sample includes 144 active foreign subsidiaries in Iran from across a broad range of industries. A structured questionnaire was distributed to firms and structural equation modeling was adopted to analyze the results.

The findings reveal how building external embeddedness in an environment with potentially poor access to valuable knowledge, and risk of knowledge leakage impacts the subsidiary’s ability to subsequently transfer this knowledge within the MNC. The authors identify the significance of absorptive capacity as a way for the subsidiary to access knowledge from and share knowledge with firms in the local market.

Departing from existing work on subsidiary embeddedness in developed markets, the authors reveal how competence creating subsidiaries manage dual embeddedness and knowledge transfer in transition economies that are low in knowledge stocks. The authors unpack how subsidiary absorptive capacity enables access to local knowledge in a transitional market and increases reverse knowledge transfer in the MNC. In doing so, the authors answer calls for work on the dynamic and complementary relationships that exists between subsidiary dual embeddedness, absorptive capacity and knowledge sourcing in less open markets. Focusing on Iran as a transitional economy, this study provides greater contextual nuance to the extant literature on subsidiary dual embeddedness.

Deaf communities including the Irish one, often identify the status of their signed languages as one of the defining indicators of their social standings. Thus, social justice measures must be intertwined with the status of signed languages. The social justice issues for Deaf communities identified here are: access to media, recognition of signed languages and education. These issues are based on several research data and are described in brief. The purpose of this paper is to locate the situational position of Deaf communities in Ireland.

To understand the way in which a more radical model of equality would work for the Irish Deaf community, the author discusses an equality framework developed by the Equality Studies Centre in University College Dublin, with the aim of advancing understanding of what equality of condition would mean for Deaf people in relation to the access to media, recognition of signed languages and education.

The evidence from research and literature shows the serious disadvantaged position held by the Deaf communities in Ireland and other countries. The data presented alone show how both discrimination and disadvantages are largely due to negative perspectives on deafness. These negative perspectives are obviously influenced by historical, medical and religious factors.

The article raises awareness of the implications of different levels of equality on the status of signed languages. These levels, by default, affect the socio‐economic statuses of Deaf communities. It is obvious from this study that equality of condition is the best option for Deaf communities to achieve. This option demands a level of recognition and respect for signed languages, equal to that afforded to national and dominant languages. This would help to minimise the belief that signed languages are mere compensatory tools, which in turn, would create more egalitarian treatment for Deaf people who wished to pursue their main identity through the use of signed languages.